The Prettiest Feathers (28 page)

I grabbed a sheet of blank paper and began writing as fast as I could.

While I waited for Pop’s response, I thumbed through Robbins’s book. He hadn’t highlighted or underlined anything, but I found a slip of folded paper tucked inside. It was a receipt for dry cleaning a blazer. Sheila’s receipt—the blazer Sarah Sinclair had borrowed for her date with John Wolf.

Robbins was Wolf.

That first day, right at the crime scene—where only hours earlier he had ended Sarah Sinclair’s life—he stood on the sidewalk in the rain and waited for me to walk out. There were cops all over the place, but that didn’t bother him. He was back in a couple of days. Coffee, he said. Read this book, he said. He had given me the answer, and I had missed it. Now Sheila was dead, and I was next.

The fax clicked on.

I weighed the risks of going back out onto the street, and figured I’d be better off staying put. Holding the .32 in my hand, I curled up on Robert’s couch.

I dozed on and off, but after only a few hours I was fully awake—tired, but feeling somewhat better, and more in control in the daylight. The medication seemed to be doing its thing. Now I had to do mine.

My plane wasn’t leaving until a little after ten. I decided to call ahead, just to make sure that Sarah Humphrey would give me the time of day.

“I’m going to be in Florida a little later today,” I told her when I had her on the line, “and I’d like to stop by and have a talk with you.”

“You’re a cop?” she asked.

“Right,” I said.

“What’s this about?” she wanted to know. “Your brother.”

There was silence on the other end of the line. I decided to wait it out.

After several seconds, Sarah Humphrey asked, “What’s he done now?”

“Possibly nothing. I’m still trying to determine that. I’d like to stop by and ask you a few questions. Routine background stuff, that’s all.”

“Do I have to do this?”

“No.”

She sighed, then said, “Yes, I do. I’ve been expecting this call for a long time. I’ll be home all day.”

Before leaving for the airport, I left a message on Swartz’s voice mail outlining the Robbins angle. Then I dialed my home number and entered the remote access code for my answering machine. There were five messages: three from Hanson telling me to get down to his office, and one from Robert, saying that when they got through wringing the alcohol out of his liver, he’d like to take me out on a real date. “Somewhere nice, with linen tablecloths and a no-smoking section,” he said.

The final message was from Dr. Street. “I’ve found a little information on that Wolf case,” he said. “Give me a call at your convenience.”

I dialed Street’s office number, but got his service. I left a message saying that I had a plane to catch, but Dr. Street could fax whatever he had directly to Pop.

I saw Sarah Humphrey as soon as I pulled the rental car into the parking slot beside her mobile home. She was shaking the wrinkles out of a blue workshirt and pinning it to the umbrella-style clothesline in her side yard. She heard me walking toward her and turned to face me. There was no smile, just a vague look of resignation in her tired eyes.

At first glance, Sarah was like any other housewife surviving near the poverty line on a steady diet of carbohydrates and fats: bloated, even a bit obese, with the sallow look that can come from any number of evils (booze, cigarettes, stress, AIDS, a variety of cancers). But a closer look hinted at what had been there before, years earlier—softness, prettiness. She had probably been a beautiful child, a tempting teenager.

“I don’t see how I can help you,” she said, squinting against the brightness of the afternoon sun. “My brother and I aren’t close. He sends money every now and then, but doesn’t even enclose a note. He just wraps the cash in a plain
piece of paper and sticks it in an envelope. He sent me five hundred dollars just a few weeks ago.”

“From where?” I asked.

She looked puzzled. “I guess he was at home.”

“Which is where?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere in Vermont, I think. Like I said, we’re not close.”

Sarah went on to explain that Wolf owned a construction company.

When I asked to see a photo of her brother, Sarah told me that it was a family joke the way Paul was always just out of camera range at the few picture-taking occasions they ever had.

“But I do have one,” she said.

“About the money he sends you—”

“I don’t know why he does that,” she said. Then, in an almost inaudible voice, she added, “Guilt, probably.”

“Guilt?”

Her face reddened. “There were some incidents. When we were kids.”

With a wave of her hand, as if she were shooing flies, she said, “It was nothing, really. Just the usual brother-sister stuff.”

She continued pinning her laundry to the clothesline, not looking at me, working faster now than she had been when I arrived.

“Sarah,” I began, “I need to know about the sexual relationship you and your brother shared.”

She dropped the pair of jeans she had just pulled from the laundry basket and spun around to face me.

“Who told you that? Did
he
tell you that?”

“I’ve never met your brother,” I said, realizing that probably wasn’t true.

“Well, they’re wrong—whoever said it. There was never any sex, ever. Just—”

I waited for her to continue.

“You know how boys are. They get curious, do things—”

She turned away from me again, but just stood there this time, not moving, not even pretending to care about her laundry. “What are you going to do with this? Are you going to write it down or something?”

“I’m just going to listen,” I told her. “And remember.”

“Let’s go inside,” she said, leading the way. “I need some coffee.”

We sat down at her kitchen table with mugs of muddy brew before us. It looked like it had sat in the pot since dawn.

“My brother never had it easy,” she said. “You have to understand that, because it explains a lot. My father was his stepfather, not his real dad, and he never accepted Paul. Not really.”

“You were kind of stuck in the middle?”

“I always took my parents’ side—you know, trying to defend them. But I know it wasn’t right what they did, the way they treated Paul. My father would tell me how crazy Paul was, how worthless. But I know my father was a drunk, and he could be really cruel when he wanted to be. Like when he would send Paul down to the coal bin.”

“What do you mean?”

“Now that my parents are dead, I probably shouldn’t speak ill of them. I mean, they aren’t here to defend themselves. But Dad really was awful to Paul. He’d make him go down in the cellar, then he’d lock him in the coal bin—sometimes for the whole night.”

“As a punishment?”

She nodded. “I used to stand by the cellar door and listen to him crying. I could hear him talking—in a little child’s voice, like he was someone else. Then he would go silent. Sometimes after my parents went to bed, I’d sneak out there and stand by the door. But there’d be nothing, no sound at all. I think the silence bothered me more than anything.”

“What about your mom?”

“She was afraid of my father. Whenever Dad took a belt to Paul, Mom would go into her room and shut the door—to
block out the noise. I never saw her take Paul’s side in anything. Not once.”

She looked down. “I was just a kid,” she said quietly. “What could I do?”

When she looked up again, there were tears in her eyes.

“You know what happened that first Thanksgiving when Paul came home from college?” she said. “When he opened his bedroom door, he saw that all his furniture was missing. My parents had sold it, like he wasn’t a member of the family anymore. The look on his face broke my heart, but Mom—she couldn’t understand why he was so upset. Stuff like that is why I wanted to get away from my parents. I couldn’t wait to get married. As soon as I did, I cut off all ties with them, just like Paul had done—although I did go to the funerals. Paul wouldn’t even do that. After he was in college, there were long periods when he didn’t come home at all. I’d hear that he’d been in town, but he didn’t come out to the house. That hurt a little, you know?”

“It sounds like you loved your brother,” I said.

“Yeah,” she agreed. “But I hated him, too.”

“Why?”

She looked down again, fidgeting with her fingers. After a long silence, she said, “He never forced himself on me or anything. I want to make that clear. I mean, he never touched me, okay?”

I nodded, but she wasn’t looking at me.

“Once I woke up in the middle of the night and saw him standing at the foot of my bed. He was just standing there, in the moonlight, staring at me and playing with himself.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing. I waited till he was through, then I went back to sleep.”

“What do you mean, ‘through’?”

“He ejaculated all over my bed.”

“He ejaculated and walked out, without either of you saying anything?”

She looked me in the eye. “Maybe you had to be there to
understand it. I was always a little afraid of Paul, never quite sure what might set him off. It’s an understatement to say that he could be explosive.”

“I know a little about the incident with the knife.”

“That was a surprise. Paul had always ducked or cowered when my father came at him. I thought he was a wimp. Mom used to say that when he was a little kid, he wet the bed because he was too scared to get up in the dark and go to the bathroom. So I was really shocked when Paul pulled that knife. There was blood all over the place. I just froze.”

I could see in her eyes that she was reliving the scene.

“I never would have thought that he’d have the nerve,” she said. “After that, I never saw him act scared again. I think he was as shocked by the attack as I was. He was so insecure. He never knew how to get along with other people. When he was so interested in me, I think it was because he wanted a girlfriend—but he didn’t know how to go about it. He was good looking, too.”

“So when he jerked off on you, you thought it was safest to just keep quiet?”

“That, plus I knew that it was Paul’s nature to watch. It wasn’t unusual for me to catch him staring at me, and it wasn’t unusual for him to handle his privates while he did it. Like when he used to sit outside the shower and watch me wash my hair. That was one of his favorite things for a while.”

She seemed to be suddenly aware of me again. “You sure you aren’t taping this?” she asked.

“No tape,” I told her. “What I really need to know is if any of this activity between you and your brother ever led to violence. On his part, I mean.”

“There was only one time when I thought it might,” she said. “He was spying on me when I was with one of my boyfriends, making out. I didn’t have any clothes on. He chased the boy away, then came toward me with a broken bottle in his hand. I knew what he was thinking.”

When she saw the question in my eyes, she said, “He was gonna use it on me. Rape me with it. He didn’t say so, but I
knew it. For some reason, he changed his mind. That night is when I first realized that my brother was capable of terrible things.”

“Do you think he’s capable of murder?”

“Sure,” she said—emotionlessly, as if I had asked her something benign. “Is that what he did? Murder someone?”

“We don’t know.”

“He was in Vietnam for a year. I think he spent the whole time in Saigon, not in combat. I don’t think he killed anyone over there. He wrote to me a few times. He was a clerk or something—did the paperwork on the soldiers who died, the ones that were being shipped back here. I think he had to help with the bodies sometimes, too.”

I wondered if that was where he fine-tuned his knowledge of physiology. He certainly knew his way around a carotid artery. According to the real Chadwick, Wolf had been a premed student.

“Did you know that he was listed as killed in action?” I asked.

“Why would they think he died?”

“It looks as if he wanted them to think that. He was drafted right about the same time he started using the name Paul Pease.”

“I know he thought some man named Pease was his father, but I didn’t know he used that name. I’d believe it, though. One time while he was in the service, I wrote to him, but the post office sent the letter back to me. I never understood that until right now.”

“To get it into his military records, he had to get his name changed legally.”

With a deep sigh, she said, “I guess I’ll never know my brother.”

“Is there anyone that Paul was close to?”

Sarah shook her head. “He was a loner. He loved to read, and he was real smart. I remember one book he must have read a hundred times—it was about mythology. Sometimes he told me the stories, but he changed them around. He said
he was making them more interesting. I remember one story that he said was his favorite. It was about a guy who could fly. He never did tell me the real ending for that one.”